In a report in November 2014, the National Institute for Health Care Management showed in a series of charts how 1 percent of the U.S. population accounts for nearly 23 percent of overall health care spending. The data from the 2012 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ), also shows that 5 percent of Americans are responsible for a 50 percent of all spending. As the NIHCM report says, “Any meaningful effort to control spending growth must account for this extreme concentration.” For health care journalists these numbers are instructive in particular because the lowest-spending half of the population accounts for less than 3 percent of total spending, about $234 per person, per year. This chart show the top spenders, the factors that drive high spending, and why these patterns of spending persist over time.
